The big decline in markets over the last few days motivated some companies to announce very large buybacks not just in absolute dollar terms but also in relation to their market caps. We saw a total of 21 companies announce buybacks including a $2 billion buyback by Thomson Reuters (TRI) representing around 4.5% of its market cap at announcement. This buyback is perplexing because TRI is not cheap, revenue growth has slowed into the single digits and the company has $3.3 billion of net debt on the balance sheet.
Cash is however not an issue for the top 5 buybacks in our list below, two of which happen to be net-nets (QD and NISN). Qudian (QD) is a Chinese company that recently received a delisting notice from NYSE because its stock dipped below $1 for 30 consecutive days. This buyback announcement helped the stock jump up more than 37% yesterday and it is up another 11% today.